


Telling the Storm

by EHyde



Series: Hiryuu Castle is Full of Time Portals [4]
Category: Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Genre: Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 16:07:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12257679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EHyde/pseuds/EHyde
Summary: Yonhi, the castle's young priestess, seeks refuge and guidance in the past when a vision leads her to question the gods. Side-story for "What We Make."





	Telling the Storm

Yonhi steps through the portal into quiet. Blessed, peaceful quiet. Images of destruction still fill her mind, but these are only the product of her own imagination, memories of a dream. The gods do not speak to her in the past.

She hadn’t meant to come back, not yet. She wants to see Hiryuu again—she  _will_  see him again—but she’s still not ready. But when the gods sent that dream—when it followed her into her waking hours and she just needed to  _think_  but could not because the visions pressed too hard—she had to escape.

Ah, well, it’s not as if being in the past means she  _has_  to go to Hiryuu, Yonhi reasons as her head begins to clear. If she finds a quiet place to keep to herself, she can take all the time in the world to weigh her options…or at least until the magic of the time portals sends her back to the present. It could be anywhere from hours to days.

If she wishes to avoid him, the safest option would be to leave the castle entirely—but to reappear outside the castle in her own time might cause more trouble than it’s worth. None of the hidden quiet places Yonhi knows will be here in  _this_  castle…but they might have equivalents. The battlements have always been a favorite. Nobles and courtiers won’t bother her up there, but she can look out and see the whole of Kuuto and beyond.

In this time, it’s not much different. Kuuto is smaller by far—and isn’t even called Kuuto yet, she remembers from last time—and the roads leading to the castle are lined by wild open fields of yellow grass rather than lush green farmland. She wonders if the lands of the Wind Tribe are less populated in this era too.

Yonhi shudders, wrapping her arms around herself to ward off an imagined wind. The gods had sent her visions of a storm. Homes torn apart by raging winds, children swept away by rising waters, it would strike the southern coast of the Wind Tribe…more than two thousand years from now. She breaths to calm herself. The gods can’t force her to relive those scenes again and again, not here. Of course she can’t let them happen, of course she has to do something, but—

“Miss?”

Yonhi turns around. A familiar golden-haired young man stands behind her. “Zeno,” she says. “I suppose I should have known I wouldn’t pass unnoticed. Though it’s Shuten I’d have expected to see up here.”

“If Ryokuryuu wants to look out over the land, he just jumps,” says Zeno. “But miss…you’re not from the palace, but you look familiar. Do I know you?”

Ah. Yonhi’s last visit was her first time here in years, but it hadn’t been Hiryuu’s first time meeting her as an adult. This must be before that time. “Do you remember a girl from the future?”

“Oh! Miss Yonhi!” Zeno grins. “Of course I remember. It’s not everyday you meet someone from a different time. Why are you by yourself? If you couldn’t find the others, I can take—”

“No!” Yonhi pulls away as Zeno tries to take her by the hand. “I’m sorry, Zeno. I was actually hoping that no one would find me today.”

“Oh, hide and seek? We can play that game…”

Yonhi can’t help it. She laughs. “Zeno, I’m not a child anymore,” she says. “I just—I needed time to think, by myself. I couldn’t find that in the present—I mean, the future.”

“I come up here to be alone too, sometimes,” says Zeno. “If you don’t mind, Miss Yonhi, we could be alone together for a while? We don’t have to talk.” At Yonhi’s nod, he sits cross-legged on the stone floor, looking out over the wall. Yonhi remains standing—but in the presence of another person, the once-calming silence becomes uncomfortably stifling.

“Zeno,” she finally speaks up. “You were a priest, weren’t you?” At Zeno’s nod, she explains. “They don’t speak to me in this time. That’s why I came here.”

“…do you know why they don’t speak to you?”

“They did at first,” says Yonhi. “They screamed and screamed that I didn’t belong here, so loud I thought I would die. But when Hiryuu said he was happy to see me, they stopped.”

“Ah,” says Zeno. He looks down. “So it’s not…ah, nevermind.”

“In my time,” says Yonhi, “I’m meant to be the priest who advises the king.”

“You said something about that,” Zeno remembers. “Only it wasn’t you last time. Is it nice?” he asks. “Before Hiryuu, none of the four kings acknowledged the gods.”

“My king says all the right things, but he doesn’t believe, either,” says Yonhi. “I don’t think he needs to. He’s a good king,” she insists, “and the gods have never cared to direct the course of the kingdom. But they showed me—” She chokes back tears as she describes the horrors of the storm to Zeno. “They didn’t show me this so I could save people,” she says. “They’re  _gods_. If they don’t want it, they—they don’t have to send a storm at all!”

“But you will!” says Zeno, wide-eyed terror on his face. “You will save them—won’t you?”

“They showed me so that I would tell the king! So that when it happened exactly as I said, he would finally believe!”

Zeno takes a sharp breath and draws back. “The gods aren’t—they wouldn’t—” He takes a deep breath, then reaches out to grasp Yonhi’s hands. “But, Yonhi,” he says. “Your king isn’t the one who needs to know.”

* * *

The moment Yonhi reappears in the present, the vision floods her mind again. Most visions come to her in dreams or in brief flashes and that’s that. This is meant to overwhelm her, to drive her towards her default action: she is the king’s priestess, she must tell the king. And it almost worked. Zeno’s suggestion should have been obvious.

Yonhi goes to the stables and asks for the fastest horse they can give her. Her visions haven’t given her a deadline, but she reaches Fuuga by nightfall and knows it’s not too late. “I need to speak with the general,” she announces breathlessly. The guards at Fuuga’s gate offer her rest and refreshment first—the Wind Tribe’s reputation holds true—but at her insistence, they lead her inside.

In his late forties—of an age with the king—Son Mundeok is the oldest of Kouka’s five generals. Yonhi knows of his strength in battle and knows also that, unlike the king, Mundeok is a devout man. “Priestess,” Mundeok says. “To what do I owe a visit from Hiryuu Castle at such an hour?”

He does not speak devoutly to her. Mundeok has seen Yonhi at Five Tribes meetings, knows that her words to the king are her own and that she has never tried to show him the way of the gods. “General Mundeok,” Yonhi begins. “I know that to you I am not a prophet, but please, believe me.” Then the details of her dream spill forth. And when she finishes, the gods are satisfied. No longer must she fight to hold the visions back.

Mundeok rests a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder. “Priestess,” he says. “We are the people of the Wind. You should trust that we know how to weather a typhoon.”

“Not this one,” says Yonhi, shaking her head. “Please—” Mundeok pauses, then nods. “The villages on the southern coast, you have to get the people to safety. And—if there’s any way you can make them listen—the northern coast of Xing.” Mundeok has heard Yonhi lend her strategies to the king’s forays into Xing, has led those attacks himself. What will he make of this request? But he closes his good eye and nods.

“It will be done as you say, Priestess. Thank you.” There is a question there. Yonhi is the king’s priestess. It’s not her place to go to the generals herself.

“His Majesty sees every prophecy as the temple’s play for power,” Yonhi says.  _And he’s not even wrong._  “He  _is_  a good king, I know he wouldn’t want these deaths, but—you know he doesn’t believe.” And if he believed afterwards, he would only resent the gods for using him. No one could win this game. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t let—”

Mundeok wipes the tear from her cheek and gives her a kind, fatherly smile. “I understand,” he says. She wonders how much he does. If he knew that the gods would use his people as pawns—but he listened, and that’s what matters. “Priestess Yonhi,” he says, using her name this time, “the Wind Tribe will always remember what you and the gods have done for us.”

She returns to the castle the next morning. King Junam may yet learn of the storm that strikes the coast of the Wind Tribe. But when he does, it will be for the strength of the people who survived it, and not because of the whims of the gods. Yonhi had believed for years that Kouka Kingdom didn’t need the gods’ guidance. Now, for the first time, she’s beginning to realize that she had it backwards. The gods do not deserve the people of Kouka Kingdom.


End file.
